If anybody ever gets to read about this, you won’t be able to look them in the face!
Life isn’t a ’40s movie. You can’t just get on a God damn plane and make the whole *world* come out right!
We made a mistake. Maybe what we underestimated was the kind of insanity that $7 billion worth of bombing could produce.
They brought in the whole fucking press corps! They want to sanitize the story? Bastards!
Dith Pran! P-R-A-N. He disappeared in Phnom Penh in 1975. Pran is his first name. Any information you can give… well, we’re hoping for any information at all! He was last seen in ’75.
As they pondered their options in the White House, the men who decided to bomb and then to invade Cambodia concerned themselves with many things: great power conflicts and collapsing dominoes, looking tough and dangerous to the North Vietnamese, relieving pressure on the American troop withdrawal from the South. They had domestic concerns, as well, which helps explain why they kept the bombing of Cambodia a secret for as long as they could. And they may be assumed not to have ignored self-interest in their own careers. But they specifically were not concerned with, were the Cambodians themselves. Not the people, not the society, not the country. Except in the abstract as instruments of policy. Dith Pran and I tried to record and bring home here the concrete consequences of these decisions to real people – to human beings, the people left out of the Administration’s plans, but, who paid the price and took the beating for them.
Cambodia. To many westerners it seemed a paradise. Another world, a secret world. But the war in neighboring Vietnam burst its borders, and the fighting soon spread to neutral Cambodia. In 1973 I went to cover this side-show struggle as a foreign correspondent of the New York Times. It was there, in the war-torn country side amidst the fighting between government troops and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, that I met my guide and interpreter, Dith Pran, a man who was to change my life in a country I grew to love and pity.
I got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country. That’s their law, that’s our law. You impede me, you’re breaking the Cooper-Church Amendment!
K.R.’s making a push for the airport road. If they cut it, the city could be lost. We hype these people up. “You’ll be all right with us,” we tell them. Now look at all this *fucking* mess!
I never really gave him any choice. One time we tried to discuss leaving. I talked to him about it, but we never really discussed it. I discussed it with Swain and Rockoff. But I never discussed it with him. He stayed because I wanted him to stay. And I stayed because…
